Innovator-in-Chief

It’s hard to change things. Particularly if the things you’re trying to change are huge.

Part of what gives me some hope for the future – in spite of how grim life is at the moment for most us, financially – is the fact that the United States has an executive leader who’s actively trying to improve the nation and the world by changing what we do and how we do it.

  Though he faces enormous tasks, from our hurting economy, environment and international standing to our ailing infrastructure, educational and health-care systems,  Barack Obama seems eager to get going and restructure all the desperately tangled, outmoded policies and procedures that make the U.S. inefficient and less successful in some ways than other advanced nations.  

I’m hoping Obama’s example will encourage the rest of the population to be brave, too, and stop clinging to ways that don’t work. If the U.S.’s long, long season of social and economic paralysis changes to one of imagination and daring, our entrepreneurs of all kinds will step up and supply the ideas we need to redesign the poorly functioning parts of our country. 

One thing’s sure: If we’re going to become innovators ourselves and understand what needs changing and why, we’re going to need a lot of information. Take a step in that direction with us and visit Geniocity.com’s blog pages on Thursday, April 16,  to find out how the growing revolution in wind energy may be one way to remake America and Earth.

Wind of Change – A Geniocity.com project

It’s Geniocity.com’s mission to expand the global conversation about creativity and innovation.

To engage our readers in that discussion and offer them a more comprehensive view of what’s happening on the creative frontier, the Geniocity.com blog team plans to periodically select an important issue  that each writer will examine from the unique perspective of his or her particular field. Like an architectural charrette, each of these group projects will present a collection of our individual takes on a complex topic for you to absorb and respond to through posted comments on our blog pages.  

On this coming Thursday, April 16, I hope you’ll join us for Wind of Change, a look at the cutting edge of wind energy, a renewable power source growing in popularity and impact around the world and in your own community. You’ll find insights on aspects of wind power including next steps in technology and policy, the business future, economic and environmental effects, legal questions, design developments and planning.

We’re looking forward to your participation in a lively debate over the pros and cons and all the gray areas in between, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and ideas.

Thanks, and see you there.

Fund creative entrepreneurs and watch the jobs appear

Americans can be pretty unadventurous about some things, but starting businesses isn’t among them. 

Just look below at the list of winners announced Friday by the 2009 Five Ventures business-plan contest sponsored by the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and Charlotte-area corporations: The range of creativity is astonishing, and these are just the results of  a single technology-biz contest covering the Southeastern U.S. Scads of these contests take place every year across the country, all of them turning up promising  ventures in a wide array of industries (though we need more that focus on industries other than IT and bio-tech).

Think of the new jobs these start-ups could generate. That’s why it’s so important, not just that banks start lending again, but also that government programs, venture capitalists, angel investors, community-development groups and other seed-money sources start providing more money to entrepreneurs of all kinds. That includes small-business – and I mean really small-business – entrepreneurs, whose companies  provide jobs to half the American workforce and 60-80 percent of the net new jobs created since the 1990s, according to the Small Business Administration.

See what entrepreneurs are thinking up:

Biotechnology – Pharmaceutical

• WINNER - Countervail Corporation (Charlotte, NC) – A repurposed Alzheimer’s drug is used to protect against exposure to nerve gas and pesticides.
• RUNNER-UP - Inhibikase Therapeutics (Smyrna, GA) – A new class of drug that is simultaneously effective against bacterial and viral infections in humans.

Biotechnology – Devices

• WINNER - HepatoSys, Inc. (Charlotte, NC) – Develops products related to the preservation and restoration of organs for transplantation.
• RUNNER UP – Microscopy Research Innovations, Inc. (Knoxville, TN) – Has created a guidance system for physicians that track a needle’s location inside a patient’s body.

Information Technology / Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

• WINNER - Balaya, LLC (Savannah, GA) – Provides a set of a social media tools for businesses to use internally as an enterprise solution or externally as a consumer-facing engagement tool.
• RUNNER-UP - BestMedical, Inc. (Savannah, GA) – Combines existing leading-edge and proprietary technologies to create a web-based solution for users to answer virtually any question about medical conditions and the related ongoing life challenges.

Retail / Services

• WINNER - TrakLok Corporation (Knoxville, TN) – A product and service company deploying a solution to secure and globally track intermodal shipping containers.
• RUNNER-UP - T1 Visions, Inc. (Charlotte, NC) – Developed cutting-edge technology solutions that provide a unique multi-media experience to restaurant patrons.

Student / Non-Profit

• WINNER - Entogenetics (Raleigh, NC) – Discovered how to transfer the spider’s silk production gene into the common silk worm, creating the means for large scale, inexpensive spider silk production.
• RUNNER-UP - Student Relief for Higher Learning of America, Inc. (Charlotte, NC) – Provides a solution for college students to lease text books which can reduce course materials costs up to 60% over the duration of their career.

Holidays are an especially creative time

Especially if you have a microwave. So Happy Passover or Easter or Spring Equinox ( a little late), and remember: No real food was harmed in the making of this video.

Will many hands make light work of recreating America?

While we’re on the subject of different kinds of job corps and the difference they might make to U.S. infrastructure and education: An important piece of national-service legislation creating several new types of  volunteer job corps was passed by the House of Representatives about 10 days ago. President Obama was expected to sign it soon after returning to Washington, D.C., Tuesday after his eight-day European tour.

The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act dedicates $6 billion over five years to creating 175,000 new volunteer positions for Americans of all ages, from middle-school students to retirees, and to establishing four new service corps: Clean Energy, Education, Healthy Futures (helping create access to health care) and Veterans Service. It also increases hands-on, service-education opportunities for volunteers and increases the money awards for formal education that volunteers can earn for themselves or their children.

The new  thousands of volunteers are expected to make the nation’s disaster-relief efforts more effective and to generate economic benefits in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

That’s a lot of helping hands. But I wonder how much Americans’ ever-more-desperate need to earn money will discourage  them from volunteering. I hope I’m wrong, but feeding the mouths at home may trump feeding their own souls.

Ideas for rent

Few aspects of U.S. society need innovating more than the housing market. News about reckless subprime lending, bank failures and toxic assets has dominated the news for months now, but most of what we’ve heard has been focused on homeownership – who shouldn’t have been encouraged to try it, who has lost it and what to do with the thousands and thousands of foreclosed houses now unoccupied and decaying in every American city.

But another problem exists: the lack of affordable rentals for people who now can’t, or never could, consider owning a home.  Not only do we always have lots of people in need of better, safer, more convenient apartments, but now we also have big crowds of former homeowners in sudden need of places to lease … and local governments are tearing down dwellings as fast as they can.

Turns out the John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation has already recognized the need to convert foreclosed houses and rundown properties into decent rental homes and has gotten creative about it. The foundation is funding projects that aim to preserve rentals while assisting displaced military personnel and the homeless, increasing energy efficiency and improving public transit to make rental home locations more usable and desirable. Twelve states and cities – Denver, Florida, Iowa, Los Angeles, Maryland, Massachussetts, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon/Portland, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington/Seattle - have received grants totaling $32.5 million, part of the foundation’s larger $150 million Window of Opportunity Initiative to preserve rental homes.

This sounds to me like an excellent opportunity to create an even bigger public-partnership between foundations and the federal government’s Job, Artists and green-job corps. Not only could our roads, bridges and other shared infrastructure be repaired and updated by the thousands of American workers in need of jobs, as the Obama administration has planned, but many distressed homes and apartment buildings could be, too. Construction, electricity and plumbing experts could make the dwellings solid and functional while artists of all kinds could make them and the lots they’re on safe and attractive through design and decoration.  

Maybe a sidecar program could allow the corps workers to coach new tenants on upkeep and repair of their improved abodes.  We sure need more efficient ways of creating a safer, better-housed and -employed nation – why not all three simultaneously?

They got creative on the court

I have just two words for you this morning:

TAR HEELS!

Creativity gone wrong

Not all creativity is good. (I feel like Hagrid: “Harry, not all wizards are good.”) Sometimes, through unconcern, poor research, poor execution or just plain evil intentions, creative projects cause terrible harm.

And when the same creative people cause terrible harm over and over again, they need to be stopped. There are lots of individuals and groups who match the description, but the one I’m talking about right now is the Army Corps of Engineers.

It seems to fall into the creative category of “appallingly misguided.” The corps has been responsible for some of the most environment-destroying projects in modern U.S. history, including Hoover Dam and the draining of the Everglades. It created the New Orleans levees that have wrecked the marshlands protecting the Mississippi Delta from hurricanes and – more horribly for humans - failed during Hurricane Katrina, drowning the city and many of its inhabitants. These poorly-thought-out creative engineering projects continue to cause problems and endless hassles for the regions affected by them.

And there are more coming. I’m particularly concerned about the new dike that will help create landfill for a shifted Port of Cleveland site and the  redesign of the I-90 Innerbelt that snakes around Cleveland’s city center. The corps is necessarily involved with both and that gives me nightmares. What permanently damaging practices and structural designs will they invent next? And how much will we have to pay to undo what’s likely to cost hundreds of millions to build in the first place?

They’re as destructively constructive as beavers. The Everglades, New Orleans and the environment around Hoover Dam and the resulting Lake Mead may never recover from what they did.  And Cleveland has enough problems without allowing such a shortsighted bunch to affect its future.

So now that this town is about to see some federal stimulus money for infrastructure work, I hope local residents and the local governments – city and county – will demand thorough independent studies to determine what the real effects of corps involvement in the projects will be.

Creativity Talent Show! With a theme…

The American Dance Festival announced this week that dancer and choreographer Ohad Naharin will receive the 2009 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival  Lifetime Achievement Award, a $50,000 prize. The award honors choreographers who have dedicated their lives and talent to creating modern dance.  

   Ohad Naharin

The first “Sammy” was  presented in 1981, the year I was an ADF press-office intern – Martha Graham won and one of her signature pieces, Lamentation, was danced at the celebration by Janet Eilber, now artistic director of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. 

This year’s award will be presented to Naharin, artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, on June 25 at the Durham (N.C.) Performing Arts Center; a performance of his 2007 piece, Deca dance, will be performed afterward by the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet. 

As a tribute to Narahin, ADF and the Sammies, here’s a Friday Creativity Talent Show all their own: 

Creative thinking on demand

Most of us regard creativity as a free-thought experience, where our minds sail or scuttle where they will and happen on ideas mostly by chance, with a little help from our subconscious.

And that’s pretty much what happens when you don’t have to produce an idea – or when the idea you produce doesn’t have to be workable. But what do you do when you need to solve a real problem creatively and on deadline?  

If panicking is your answer, Jonathan Vehar has a better system for you. Vehar teaches at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) held annually for about 400 students – this year, June 21-24 in Boston – by the Creative Education Foundation. CEF, a 55-year-old institution based in Amherst, Mass., promotes a results-based method of creative thinking devised by co-founder, Alex Osborn, who was also an advertising professional and co-founder of the agency BBDO. 

  Osborn observed that people’s thoughts tend to go through six phases when coping with a creative challenge, Vehar explains. These phases include:

•  Identifying the goal or need (“gathering wish”)
•  Researching data  
•  Clarifying the challenge (what specific problem blocks the path to the goal?)
•  Generating ideas for solutions
•  Selecting and strengthening the best solution
•  Planning for action   

 Random inspiration may be great for artists, but for those in corporate situations, these steps provide a “deliberate walk” through the needed mental process, Vehar says. 

“It’s a funny thing. It’s kind of counter-intuitive,” Vehar says of systematized creativity. But in work situations constrained by circumstances including limited time and money, he notes, most people can’t just sit around and blue-sky for days. They have to produce - and the Osborn process offers a reliable, efficient way of quickly coming up with good solutions to the problems they face. 

Coincidentally, Vehar also came to the CEF method by way of advertising. An Ithaca College alumnus, he was working for an agency and fearing he wasn’t creative enough for anything but strategy when a secretary there told him about a creativity class she was taking. That’s how Vehar discovered the Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State (SUNY) and the transformative idea that creativity applied to a lot of fields. As part of earning his master’s degree in creativity and innovation there, he was sent  to CPSI (pronounced SIP-see).

His immediate reaction? ” ‘These are my peeps!’ ” Vehar recalled with a laugh. “It was  just another one of those conversions.”

Actually, Vehar admits, part of that immediate reaction included thinking, “Geez, there’s a lot of wackos here,” because people attracted to CPSI’s creative mission range from hard-line business types to those “channeling beings from outer space,” he says. But he soon realized that the ones who seemed way out were, in fact, the ones helping him in his work by providing what he calls the “creative abrasion” that provokes insights.  

Vehar’s been working with CPSI ever since, teaching the Osborn method to students who tend to return to the conference again and again for ever-deepening instruction that emphasizes practice over theory in creative case studies of different kinds. He’s even started his own organizational-development firm, New & Improved,  to teach people how to work with one another to elicit new ideas.

Business people, researchers, educators, artists – no matter who the CPSI students are every year, it’s the experience of actually being creative, of writing, reading, moving, applying metaphor and not just listening to a lecture, that gives them results, Vehar says – “and “the reason that people come back here is that they’re getting results.”

Like Vehar, Mimi Sherlock is living proof of CPSI’s appeal – once a student there, she has become a conference teacher and creative-process practitioner who has recently started her own business, Sherlock Creative Thinking, to help corporate clients. 

CPSI and its program have “become a pretty important part of who I am and what I do,” she says.

Sherlock started out studying and working in food science. She became a CPSI disciple after her professor at the University of Nebraska introduced its creative-thinking principles to her and other staffers to improve their work in their cereals lab.  A few years later, the same prof encouraged her to apply to CPSI for a scholarship to the annual conference.

“I just had kind of a life-changing week” at the institute, she says. “CPSI gave me this whole other tool set. It was a really joyful process for me.” Eventually, she became an institute teacher. “I feel like I got so much out of it, I’m happy to give back some effort.”

The whole idea behind deliberate creativity is to increase the probability of arriving at usable ideas, Sherlock explains. But she’s also enjoyed  success with it, she says, because of the attitude the creative method instills: “It’s a very positive process – when you think things are possible, usually you can make them happen.”